Robert Robinson, who has died aged 83, was the host on radio’s Brain of Britain and TV’s Ask the Family. Photograph: Dezo Hoffmann/Rex Features

Admiring colleagues and nostalgic fans have paid tribute to Robert Robinson, the veteran journalist and quiz show host, who died aged 83 on Friday. Robinson, the archetypal 1940s grammar school-boy-made-good, died at St Mary's hospital, Paddington, after a long illness.

For radio critic Elisabeth Mahoney, Robinson was "an unsung national treasure". When he stepped down from chairing Brain of Britain on Radio 4 a year ago, she argued in the Guardian that his trademark, old-fashioned use of the competitors' "honorifics and surnames" gave the show "an in-built quaintness that long outlived the era it might have belonged to".

For Private Eye, though, Robinson, who won the title of radio personality of the year in 1974 for introducing a combative interviewing style when he held a presenter's job on Today, was for ever "Smuggins": the man who gave voice to the superior and complacent notions of the educated middle classes.

Wherever listeners stand on Robinson's idiosyncratic manner, his voice helped define an era of broadcasting. Alongside the reassuring tones of presenters such as the retired Richard Baker, or the wry, worldly wise voices of the late Ned Sherrin and Humphrey Lyttelton, the sound of Robinson was part of the fabric of the BBC.

Caroline Raphael, a commissioning editor for Radio 4, described her former colleague as a "radio legend", who had "one of the most recognisable and pleasurable voices on radio.

"Many of the Radio 4 listeners will have grown up listening to Robert and enjoyed his quiet, wry intelligence. We will miss him," she said.

During a career that spanned five decades, the Liverpool-born journalist became a household name when he presented the children's early evening quiz show Ask the Family and the stylish word game Call My Bluff for the BBC in the 1970s.

His reputation as a serious presenter and television journalist was equally distinguished. Prefiguring attitudes now associated with John Humphrys and Jeremy Paxman, Robinson succeeded in breaking through what he called the "sonorous drivel" of politicians, of whom he once said: "It's impossible to make the bastards reply to a straight question."

Before joining Today in 1970, Robinson was on the satirical television show BBC3 in which the Observer's theatre critic Kenneth Tynan was infamously the first to use the word "fuck" live on air in November 1965.

Robinson was born in Liverpool but grew up in New Malden, Surrey, because his accountant father moved the family down to the London suburbs. Robinson Jr attended what he later remembered as the highly competitive Raynes Park grammar school.

He went on to Exeter College, Oxford, where he studied English and was a contemporary of Shirley Williams (née Catlin) and Robin Day, and where he met Josée Richard, the actress to whom he was married for more than 40 years. After editing the university magazine Isis, Robinson took his first steps in professional journalism by fabricating readers letters for the Weekly Telegraph when they were in short supply.

He went on to become a television columnist for the Sunday Chronicle in 1952 and edited the Atticus gossip column on the Sunday Times in the 1960s before concentrating on his broadcasting career.

Announcing her father's death, Susie Robinson said: "He had a very long, productive and successful life and we will all miss him terribly."

Robinson leaves a son and another daughter, Lucy Robinson, an actress who has appeared in Cold Feet, Doc Martin and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason. When Robinson stepped down from Brain of Britain last August, Mark Damazer, who was then the controller of Radio 4, said: "The brilliant Robert Robinson defined the art of the quiz show host. He presided over Brain of Britain with sympathy for the contestants, wit and panache."

As the genteel presenter himself would have doubtless have put it: "I bid you goodbye."

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